The Theatre of the Absurd by Martin Esslin

Author:Martin Esslin [Esslin, Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-54801-6
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2001-06-16T16:00:00+00:00

GOLDBERG: You verminate the sheet of your birth.

MC CANN: What about the Albigensenist heresy?

GOLDBERG: Who watered the wicket in Melbourne?

MC CANN: What about die blessed Oliver Plunkett?

GOLDBERG: Speak up, Webber. Why did the chicken cross the road?

STANLEY: He wanted to - he wanted to - he wanted to -

MC CANN: He doesn't know!

GOLDBERG: Why did the chicken cross the road?

STANLEY: He wanted …

MC CANN: He doesn't know. He doesn't know which came first!

GOLDBERG: Which came first?

MC CANN: Chicken? Egg? Which came first?

GOLDBERG and MC CANN: Which came first? Which came first? Which came first?1

The birthday party proceeds - with Meg, oblivious of what is going on, grotesquely playing the belle of the ball; with Goldberg, who seems to have a large number of different names, seducing the dumb blonde from next door - until eventually it culminates in a game of blind man's buff. Stanley, whose glasses have been snatched by McCann, becomes more and more hysterical, tries to strangle Meg, and is finally driven upstairs by the two sinister strangers.

In the third act, Goldberg and McCann take Stanley away in a big black car. He is now dressed in a black jacket and striped trousers, has a clean collar, wears a bowler hat, carries his broken glasses in his hand, and has become speechless and blank, like a puppet. When Meg comes down, she is still dreaming of the wonderful party and does not realize what has happened.

The Birthday Party has been interpreted as an allegory of the pressures of conformity, with Stanley, the pianist, as the artist who is forced into respectability and pin-stripe trousers by the emissaries of the bourgeois world. Yet the play can equally well be seen as an allegory of death - man snatched away from the home he has built himself, from the warmth of love embodied by Meg's mixture of motherliness and sexuality, by the dark angels of nothingness, who pose to him the question of which came first, the chicken or the egg. But, as in the case of Waiting for Godot, all such interpretations would miss the point; a play like this simply explores a situation which, in itself, is a valid poetic image that is immediately seen as relevant and true. It speaks plainly of the individual's pathetic search for security; of secret dreads and anxieties; of the terrorism of our world, so often embodied in false bonhomie and bigoted brutality; of the tragedy that arises from lack of understanding between people on different levels of awareness. Meg's warmth and love can never reach Stanley, who despises her stupidity and slatternliness, while, on the other hand, Meg's husband Petey is tongue-tied almost to the point of imbecility, so that his evident warmth and affection remain unexpressed and bottled

UP-The possibility of an overall allegorical interpretation of a

play like The Birthday Party would presuppose that the play had been written to express a preconceived idea. Pinter emphatically denies that he works in this manner:’ I think it is impossible - and certainly for me - to start writing a play from any kind of abstract idea.

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